Change management

Change management is the use of theory, processes and tools for managing the organisational and people side of a change from the current state to a desired new state - normally, in our universe, a state where there is a considerably greater use of e-learning in a way which fits the organisation's purposes and finances.

These tools include one or more structured approaches that can be used to effectively transition groups and organisations through change.

There is an extensive literature on change management in business organisations - unfortunately very little of it is of any use in universities since the "levers for change" are very different. Much experience is building up in the UK under the JISC and Higher Education Academy programmes such as Pathfinder, but little is theory-driven and even less is as yet distilled into valid conclusions for future projects.

However, some help is now available from JISC Infonet - see their Change Management InfoKit released in May 2006.

One particular theoretical framework for considering change management is the MIT90s approach. There is an extensive wikibase on this on the Higher Education Academy Benchmarking wiki - see MIT90s.

Further reading

1. The Wikipedia article on Change management (people).

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